more about the Masters in creating thiriving outdoors

Main menu

Post navigation

Woodland as a reference

I can’t complain that we are lacking fresh air recently. The DVD course (Dynamic Vegetation Design) has been working on it hard that we get our daily doze in multiple amount. A creative workshop week with staying outside in sunshine and pouring rain, several small field walks, a one day excursion, a two days trip and recently, a week’s exercise of woodland sketching. All of them were worth to experience, but this time, I am going to guide you around about the latter, how you doodle a piece of forest precisely.

What we had to do was to start a collection of reference landscapes that we probably can use it later on in our design project. It is basically a booklet of different landscapes observed more closely with the tool of drawing site plans (crown projections), sections (profile diagrams), perspective drawings or taking photos for instance. The main point was, as I said above that you can implement this landscape type that you examined in your project work.

What I did was something I was particularly curious about – how plants acts on slopes. The task didn’t tie us to stay at campus so I went home for a couple of days and did it in landscape which I have strong relations to, since my childhood: the woodland next to my parents’ place. I visited two spots on opposite sides of a hill – one a very steep slope facing South with open dolomite rocky grassland, and the other, a gentle slope facing North with a young shrubbery.

Despite the fact that during the fieldwork my dad and our dog were both eager to assist me, I had some complications in the meantime. One troublemaker for me was the task description itself. Since a couple of things were left to our interpretation, sometimes I had a hard time to proceed or to know what to do exactly.

And of course, I set another problem for myself with choosing slopes too… Climbing up and down on the steep side trying to measure the distances… Not well recommended I would say. But eventually, I made it with more or less precise measurements.

Back home after I put together the collected infos which seemed like an advanced jigsaw puzzling I tried to think about a schematic prototype which I can turn those landscapes into to use in other cases too. And also, how it could be possible to introduce and manage them.

All in all, it was a fun assignment to do, to be outside, to draw, be a bit artsy and to examine an area that I have always had a strong bonding to. It was also funny to see in how many different ways me and any of my course mates interpreted the task. After dealing with this topic for a whole week, I become more and more interested to think about vegetation and landscape not in as a static, sculptural thing, but something dynamic, something that changes all the time.